Turns Out, Hippos Can Fly (Sort Of)

The word "aerodynamic" wouldn't typically come to mind in regard to hippos, but a new study suggests that maybe it should. Researchers found that a hippopotamus trotting at full speed does indeed achieve "brief aerial phases," as they write in the journal PeerJ. That's not to say that a hippo takes off in flight, exactly, but all four of its feet are off the ground simultaneously at times, reports the Guardian. The researchers discovered this through frame-by-frame video analysis of hippos rumbling along as fast as they can, given their 4,000-pound frames.

"We show with basic video footage that hippos essentially only trot even at near-maximal speeds, and at those speeds they do get airborne with all four feet," writes study co-author Professor John R Hutchinson of the UK's Royal Veterinary College. "Which, to our knowledge, is new to science—and cool!" The study found that the four feet are off the ground simultaneously around 15% of the time during full trot, per IFL Science. In the realm of big land animals, hippos "exhibit relatively greater athletic capacity than elephants in several ways, but perhaps not greater than rhinoceroses," the researchers write. (More discoveries stories.)